The Challenge
Over 500 people applied to HACK2026 — I was selected as one of 48. I was assigned random teammates from across Europe and given 48 hours to build something meaningful. Going in, I honestly didn't expect to get accepted. 48 hours later, we were standing on stage as winners.
Our team targeted one of Europe's most pressing challenges: labour shortages. We built a humanoid robot system designed to operate in real-world service environments — think restaurants, logistics, last-mile delivery.
What We Built
In 48 hours, we built a complete autonomous humanoid robot pipeline. The robot can navigate outdoors using GPS and compass data, plan waypoints from plain typed instructions, and walk to its destination entirely on its own. It can also autonomously pick up and place objects — demonstrated live by handling a Coke can and placing it into a bag.
For the demonstration we showed it delivering a pizza box, showing a full end-to-end system from instruction to autonomous execution in a real-world use case.
Photos
Tech Stack
The Team
Huge shoutout to my teammates: Cezar Solovastru, Miguel Huber, Benjamin Knöbel del Olmo, Xinran Wang, and Natcha Jengjirapas. What we pulled off together in 48 hours is something I won't forget.
A big thank you to Martino Russi from Hugging Face for the help with LeRobot and imitation learning — that made a massive difference. And huge thanks to the ETH Robotics Club and Declan Shine for organizing such an incredible event.
Read Full Post